Chapter 9 #2
“We have you on camera at this motel. We also have a blood trail leading from a first-floor room with a shattered window. The room was, to put it mildly, destroyed. Blood on the carpet, on the walls, significant property damage.” He slid another photo across, this one of the motel room aftermath.
Even in the flat, clinical framing of an evidence photograph, it looked like a bar fight had taken place.
“The blood isn’t all one type. Some matches yours.
Some doesn’t match anything in any database we have access to. ”
I kept my expression neutral. If someone was going to be the first to bring up all the paranormal shit that had barged in on my perfectly normal life, it wasn’t going to be me.
“You have visible injuries.” Davis nodded toward my forearm, where the gauze had been replaced by the female agent who’d driven me here. “And we found you handcuffed to a bed in a private safe house that you accessed with the assistance of a federal park ranger.”
“There are explanations for all of that,” I said.
“We’d love to hear them.” Harwood leaned back in his chair. “Who hired you, Miss Gregory?”
I blinked. “Hired me to do what?”
“Mark Alvarez was killed. Someone must have wanted him dead. Probably the same person who cuffed you to that bed. Who was it? The ranger? Someone she works with?”
“Nobody hired me. Mark was my friend.”
“Then why did someone want him dead?” Davis’s voice was clipped, efficient. “And did they eventually turn on you, or was it the ranger or someone else who handcuffed you?”
I stared at them both.
They thought I was a contract killer. Or at minimum, an accomplice to one.
They’d constructed a narrative from the available evidence that cast me as a young woman who had gotten in over her head with dangerous people, participated in or facilitated a murder, been injured when her associates turned on her, and been stashed in a safe house when things went sideways.
It was, I had to admit, a considerably more plausible explanation than the truth.
“I didn’t kill Mark. Nobody hired me to do anything. And the person who handcuffed me to the bed did it because he was trying to protect me, in his own extremely misguided way.”
“He.” Harwood pulled another page from the folder. “The man from the hospital? Large, dark-haired, no ID, multiple visits to your bedside. Tell us about him.”
“He’s not involved in Mark’s death.”
“You’re protecting him.”
“I’m telling you the truth. Mark was killed by something that is not a person and is not an animal, and no one in this room is going to believe me if I elaborate, so I’m going to exercise my right to not waste both our time.”
Harwood and Davis exchanged a look. It was a controlled, practiced look, the interrogation equivalent of a doubles team at the net silently agreeing on the next play.
“Miss Gregory.” Harwood closed the folder.
“Given the circumstances—the hospital escape, the blood-soaked motel room, your visible injuries, and your discovery in a restricted safe house handcuffed to a piece of furniture—I can almost certainly get a psychiatric hold ordered by a judge at the very least. For now, you can sit here and decide when you’re ready to tell the truth. ”
They left.
The door closed with the pneumatic hiss of a lock engaging, and I was alone in the room.
I sat there.
The guard outside shifted his weight. I could hear it through the door, the creak of his duty belt and the faint squeak of his boot sole on the floor. He was probably thinking about lunch.
I was thinking about Silas.
About whether he’d reached the mountains yet, whether the blood trail held, whether the skinwalker was holed up in some cave or ravine slowly knitting its broken limbs back together while the clock ticked and I was stuck here with these assholes.
I put my head on the table and closed my eyes.
Time passed. I couldn’t tell how much. The camera’s tiny red indicator light blinked steadily in my peripheral vision. The guard outside coughed once and then returned to silence.
I was beyond exhausted, drifting in the gray space between sleep and wakefulness, my cheek against the cool metal table, my thoughts looping through the same circuits without arriving anywhere useful.
Then it hit me.
All at once, like a wave breaking over the back of my skull and flooding downward through every nerve in my body.
The dread.
It poured through me from someplace below conscious thought, the wolf inside surging to a state of alert so fast I was up from the table and on my feet before my eyes had fully focused.
It’s here.
“Oh, shit.” I spun toward the door. “Oh shit, it’s here!”
I crossed the room in two steps and pounded on the door with my open palm. The sound was flat and metallic and unsatisfying.
“Hey! HEY! Open this door!”
The guard’s face appeared in the narrow window, annoyed.
He looked even younger than I’d initially estimated, maybe twenty-three, twenty-four, with a jaw that hadn’t quite decided if it was going to be strong or not.
He looked at me the way you look at a vending machine that’s making an unexpected noise.
“I need you to listen to me,” I said, pressing my face close to the glass. “There is something in this building. Something dangerous. It’s here right now.”
His expression settled into the kind men deploy when they’ve decided a woman is being emotional. “Ma’am, you need to calm down.”
“I’m not being hysterical. I’m telling you there is a thing in this facility right now and if you don’t—”
“I’m sure there is,” He said it with infinite, condescending patience. “Why don’t you have a seat and—”
A sound cut through the building.
It was muffled by the walls and the corridor between us and wherever it originated, but it was unmistakable.
A scream.
Then another, from a different direction, male this time, truncated by something wet.
There was a gunshot, then two more in quick succession. Then a sound that wasn’t a gunshot and wasn’t a scream, but rather a scraping, tearing noise that traveled through the walls.
The guard’s hand went to his holster. His face had changed. The condescension was gone.
“What the hell was that?” He turned from the window to look down the corridor, his weapon now drawn but held with an uncertain grip.
I pressed my face against the window. “Listen to me. Listen closely. If you want to live through the next two minutes, you will shoot whoever walks through that door. I don’t care if it’s your partner or your childhood crush or your fucking mother. They aren’t who you think they are.”
He looked at me through the glass. His eyes were wide and his breathing had quickened, and I could see the calculations running behind his face: the training that told him to hold position, the sounds from the corridor that told him training hadn’t covered this, and the woman in the interrogation room who was telling him things that made no sense but who was, for whatever reason, the only one who didn’t seem at all surprised by what was happening.
“Who—” he started.
The corridor went quiet.
The silence was worse than the screams.
I heard footsteps. Measured footsteps, approaching from the left, the familiar click of boot heels on linoleum.
The guard raised his weapon and pointed it in the direction from which the sounds were coming. His arms were locked, elbows rigid, but his hands were shaking.
Yazzie came around the corner, walking with the same unhurried stride I’d seen when she arrived at the safe house with food and medical supplies. Her expression was calm and composed.
It had learned. It had watched Yazzie carefully enough to replicate the particular way she carried herself, the way her hand rested near her holster, the casualness of her movements.
“Put your gun down.” Her voice wasn’t quite Yazzie’s, but it was close enough, and I doubted the guard had met Yazzie anyway. “I’m a federal park ranger. The girl is mentally ill.”
The guard wavered. His weapon stayed up, but the angle softened by a degree, the muzzle drifting slightly off-center as his brain fought with itself.
I couldn’t blame the poor guy. She had a uniform, a badge, credentials he could see from fifteen feet.
But we’d both heard the screams thirty seconds ago, and the girl behind him was pounding on the window hard enough to rattle the frame.
“SHOOT HER!” I screamed through the glass. “It’s not her! It’s not Yazzie! SHOOT IT!”
“Stand down,” the thing wearing Yazzie’s face said. “That woman is experiencing a psychotic episode. Lower your weapon, officer.”
“Don’t listen to it! Look at me! LOOK AT ME!
” I hammered the glass. The guard half-turned, his eyes darting between me and the approaching figure, and in his face I could see the war.
Her calm tone versus the raw animal certainty in my voice and the screams that were still echoing in the corridors of his memory.
“Ma’am, I need you to stop where you are,” he said. His voice cracked on the last word. His weapon was still raised for now but the commitment behind it was eroding and every second “she” kept talking was a second his finger moved further from the trigger.
“It’s okay,” the thing said, stopping ten feet from him with its hands visible at its sides, palms out, the universal gesture of I am not a threat. “I know this is confusing. There was an incident and I’m here to assist. If you’ll radio your supervisor—”
“Don’t radio anyone. Don’t take your eyes off her. SHOOT HER.”
The guard’s jaw clenched. He looked at Yazzie, then looked at me.
He lowered his weapon.
“Thank you,” the thing said. “Now, if you’ll step aside, I need to—”
Its right hand moved. The motion was smooth and fast, nothing like the mechanical wrongness of Mark’s borrowed mannerisms.
The gun cleared the holster before the guard’s brain registered what was happening.
He started to raise his own weapon again and got it halfway up before the shot hit him in the chest. The report was deafening in the narrow corridor, a flat, concussive bark that punched through the air and left my ears ringing.
He dropped.
Not dramatically, not slowly, just down, his legs folding and his weapon clattering to the ground, his body following half a second later.
The skinwalker stepped over him without looking down, then opened the door.
I was backed against the far wall of the interrogation room with the metal chair raised over my head, ready to defend myself as best I could. The thing looked at me and its mouth made a shape that was adjacent to a smile.
“You’re resourceful,” it said with a perfect Yazzie voice. “I like that.”
Its other hand came up. Something metal glinted in it, not a firearm, but something smaller.
A tranquilizer gun.
The realization hit me just as the dart did, pumping its sedative into my neck. My legs went first, the strength draining from them as if someone had pulled a plug, and I slid down the wall and sat on the cold floor with my back against the cinder block.
The room was tilting.
The thing crouched in front of me, and through the rapidly narrowing tunnel of my vision I saw it studying me with those borrowed eyes. The charred-sage smell was everywhere now.
Silas, I thought. But the thought dissolved before it could become anything else, and the last thing I saw before the dark swallowed me was the thing’s mouth moving, forming words I couldn’t hear, wearing the face of a woman who had believed me when no one else did.